Book review: Dumb Witness

Dumb Witness is a detective fiction novel by British writer Agatha Christie. It is yet another fun-enough spirt-of-the-times type of thing; as usual the plot is driven by money, inheritance, within one of her fading English families, this time in the countryside: a worthless son, an elegant but profligate daughter, another dowdy daughter who has - horrors - married a foreigner, some greasy Greek; faithful servants and of course M. Hercule Poirot. And all narrated by the faithful Hastings.

Of the plot I got one Key Element and you'll probably want to look away now if you haven't read it; that is, that the brooch seen in the mirror is of course reversed, and so TA becomes AT and of course Bella is really Arabella. This fixes her as heavily involved; but early on the book has carefully poisionned our minds against her husband - she is weak and would do anything for him, etc - so I wasn't sure Shedunnit. In fact I went for Shedun the nail, but that someone else did the poisonning; I think you could have made a perfectly acceptable story out of two murderers. The brooch, though, feels very heavy; like an externally constructed item dropped fully formed into the story, and it doesn't quite fit. Poirot, for example, discusses her brooch with Theresa in detail, including the yeah-I-had-mine-new-but-now-any-fool-has-one and yet at no point does T say "oh yes Bella had one", as she most naturally would have.

The it-was-phosphorous and you can tell because her breath during the seance was luminous I consider rather dodgy.

Nicely, Bella goes off to a hotel, reads HP's summary, and is found dead the next day. With - ta da - no suicide note, so how can it be suicide. This puzzled me, I take too much at face value, I was trying to work out who could have come for her: my working theory was that she must have contacted someone she trusted. I now realise that I should have read the book pushing "but there was no suicide note" at me as confirmation that it was suicide.